The sharp-eared Mr Keith Norman writes from Oxford with an observation that at first made me think our command of hypothetical constructions was breaking down. For Mr Norman notices people saying things like, ‘If I’d have known that…’. At first he wondered if I’d here stood for ‘I would/should’ or ‘I had’. Then he heard someone say, ‘Had I have known that.’
Mr Norman thought people might be using in the protasis the formula that should apply only to the apodosis. But it is a question not of repeating the auxiliary would but of inserting a redundant have. I pondered it for some time before thinking to look it up in R.W. Burchfield’s New Fowler’s.
There, under ‘had’ he discusses the phenomenon, and even refers us to the mangrove swamp of section 26 of the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for have.
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